‘You put a huge question mark on the cover and then say there’s nothing wrong! We all know what you’re trying to do. You are trying to imply that socialism doesn’t know where it’s going!’
‘Don’t put words in my mouth, Deputy Qian. Who am I to know where socialism is going? Wherever it decides to go, it won’t be looking at my book cover for directions!’
‘Young Ma, things will get very dangerous for you if you carry on like this.’ Deputy Qian walks to the door and shouts, ‘You have one month to write a self-criticism.’
Walking back to my office, I suddenly find it hard to breathe. The corridor is so empty it makes me think of the desert. My colleagues probably heard the shouting and are hiding in their rooms. Neat patches of light fall from each door. The cement floor has been scrubbed so much it appears to be glazed by a thin layer of water, at the same time it looks as heavy as the earth. It suddenly occurs to me I have not seen the date tree I planted outside my flat in Yanshan since Guoping and I divorced. Apparently it has grown quite tall now and is already bearing fruit.
Mixing Blood and Urine
With my back against the wall, I pull myself up, take two steps, then stumble and fall. The ground is cold. I am at the entrance to the latrines at the corner of Nanxiao Lane. The lid to the manhole is loose — I always trip over it on my way home. The ground feels wet. I wonder where the men who tore out my eyes have gone. I glance down at my watch but cannot see it. My hands touch a black wall. I scratch and shout, ‘Let me through!’ then discover the wall is not in front of me — I have moved inside its bricks. My body cramps and hardens. I try to move my head, but it slowly cements into the darkness. I remember my throat again and shout, ‘Let me through, let me through!’. . My dream solidifies. I wake in a cold sweat, roll over and pull the quilt off the floor.
I hate mornings. They wrench me from my dreams and force me to gaze at my life’s familiar props. Each object is bathed in memories that fill my mind the instant I open my eyes, and tell me I am still living in this crumbling old shack. The newspaper ceiling above my head looks the same as it did yesterday. The brown stain by the damp wall resembles a map of China. The Sino-Russian border protrudes like a woollen glove. Last month it looked like a woman with long hair, although if you viewed it upside down it became an Alsatian dog. Sometimes my eyes wander inland to Hubei where two knights in silk pyjamas fight in mortal combat. The wire holding the newspaper in place serves as their shining swords. When my gaze reaches Inner Mongolia, I remember the dirt road I walked at fourteen on my way to visit my brother who had been sent to work on the farms. It is a road that appears again and again in hundreds of my paintings. When it rained a few days ago, the ceiling changed colour and suddenly Einstein’s face appeared. Each time I look at his face I think of Yanshan Petrochemical Plant and the hill behind, where steam from the central-heating pipes poured into the sun. At the foot of the hill was a station where fast trains never stopped. The ticket office only opened its window a few minutes before the local trains arrived.
I have painted the wall behind my desk three times now, but the paint keeps flaking off. A framed photograph of Nannan chewing the corner of her chiffon scarf leans against my lamp. My easel is in the corner. I pushed it there last night when Li Tao and Fan Cheng came round. We sat on the sofa and talked about Waiting for Godot. Fan Cheng spoke of his years breeding horses on the grasslands and of his dream to leave his job in the tax office and set up an artists’ commune on a cattle ranch somewhere away from it all. I said I was tired of working on my self-criticism and would try to wangle a sick leave and go to Hubei Province to find a suitable location. Li Tao rhapsodised about life on the road. He said nomadism is the purest form of existence. We opened some beer and Li Tao recited Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road’.
The sunbeam falling through the gap in my curtains is so bright it almost cuts through the orange sofa. I didn’t have to pay for that cloth. My sister’s work unit gave it to her last Spring Festival and she made it into a cover for me. Enough of these rambling thoughts! Get up!
My ears start to ring. I sit on the chair, push my manuscript aside and jot down a plan for the day. Morning: Go to Beijing Workers’ Hospital. Afternoon: buy some nails to mend the door-lock. Evening: take my paintings to Zhang Wen’s house and finish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I scrunch up the plan, toss it in the bin and scratch my leg with the pencil. I take a sip of water from my cup, splash the rest over my face, then look at the cigarette butts on the floor, exactly as I did yesterday, and the day before. Enough! I can’t take this any longer. I must leave, go away for good. But where should I go? Where can I go? Where do I want to go? One thing is sure: I can’t stay here. What am I afraid of? No one is guarding my gate. I can walk out, leave these city walls and go to a place where no one knows me, walk along untrodden paths, sleep under the stars.
Well, let’s just see if this trip to Hubei works out.
I hold out my cup and piss — too much! I pour some out of the window, carry the cup to the kitchen area, break an egg into a bowl, pour some urine into an empty jam jar, add the egg white, prick my finger with a pin, squeeze a drop of blood into the jar and screw on the lid. A red streak snakes through the yellow liquid. A quick shake and the mixture turns deep ochre — too dark! A few more drops of urine and the operation is complete.
Yang Ke is reading a newspaper in the hospital’s entry lodge. The desk in front holds a stack of post, a jar of green tea, registration forms clipped to a piece of cardboard, a dirty Rubik cube and a large ring of keys.
‘Hey, Ma Jian. Haven’t seen you for a long time.’ He lowers his Beijing Standard. The lock of white hair dangling over his face is brighter than his eyes.
‘It’s best no one else sees me here,’ I say.
‘Well, you better not go in then.’ He forces a smile. Friends are always pestering him for help, he is probably sick of it. ‘How many days do you want off?’ he asks, getting straight to the point.
‘I’d like a full week.’
‘You had three months off during the Campaign Against Bourgeois Liberalisation. Wasn’t that enough?’
‘I need to go away for a few days. I can’t seem to write or paint. You’re lucky, you have Weiwei to egg you on. I heard you brought out a new volume of poems last month.’
‘Oh, I wrote them off the top of my head. Passes the time though, doesn’t it? How’s your novel going?’
‘I’m working on some short stories at the moment.’
‘New Wind bookshop is selling A Hundred Years of Solitude and The Sound and The Fury. I hear they are quite good.’
‘I bought them, and a new edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The stocks are running low though. I had to buy last year’s Household Electrical Repairs Manual before they would sell me the novels.’
‘We’re having a poetry reading next week at the Old Summer Palace. Do you want to come? There will be some foreign students from the Language Institute, Hasi the Greek sinologist, a few secret police too, no doubt.’ Yang Ke rocks back in his chair. A beam of sun shines into his eyes.
‘The police broke up Hu Sha’s poetry meeting last week. Did you hear? They arrested Li Zhi, the Guizhou poet. He’s about to be sentenced apparently. Is the Dr Huang I saw last time still here?’
‘He’s on afternoon shift. But you can try Dr Sun, he’s a friend of mine. Quite decent.’
We step into the hospital’s entrance hall. Yang Ke stretches his arm through the crowd outside the reception window and bangs on the wooden frame. A pair of eyes looks up from the tiny hole. ‘Hey, Sister Zhou,’ he says, ‘be a friend, give this man an appointment for internal medicine, will you?’ He presses my shoulders down so the pair of eyes can see my face. I lean through the sea of hands and stuff my money in through the window. Once the notes have been snatched from my fingers and replaced by a thin piece of paper, Yang Ke pulls me free. ‘I must leave you now,’ he says. ‘The afternoon papers are about to arrive.’